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polychroniadis:

‘Cylindrus’ by Dennis Ramos.
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[gallery] Christos Pantocrator in South Carolina

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Imagine

Imagine if Hillary said, “What I did with that private email server was stupid and wrong. I am sorry and I will learn from this and not make the same mistake again. And, just for the record, the ability to admit when I’m wrong is one of the major points that distinguishes me from my opponent.”

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[gallery] sovtime:

Мурманск начала 1970-х. Волга ГАЗ-24 рядом с гостиницей Параллель.

Murmansk in early 70s. Volga GAZ-24 near the hotel The Parallel.

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Eric Hoffer on Trump

I have recently been reading Eric Hoffer’s 1950 bestseller The True Believer, and it’s a fascinating book for this moment. It seems to me to offer a convincing analysis of the rise of Trump but also an indication of why his movement will fail.

For instance, these passages offer some real insight into the success Trump has had so far:

It would seem then that the most fertile ground for the propagation of a mass movement is a society with considerable freedom but lacking the palliatives of frustration […]

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society. […]

The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of disintegration. […]

Such a “compact corporate structure” being the Stoic/Christian moral world of Appalachia, the collapse of which J. D. Vance describes in Hillbilly Elegy.

About the possibility of a dangerous mass movement in America, Hoffer offers these sobering words:

The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American’s hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
Is anything more universally true of Trump’s supporters than that they have lost confidence in the American way of life?

Here’s Hoffer’s description of the leader of such a mass movement:

It needs the iron will, daring and vision of an exceptional leader to concert and mobilize existing attitudes and impulses into the collective drive of a mass movement. The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action. He evokes the enthusiasm of communion — the sense of liberation from a petty and meaningless individual existence. What are the talents requisite for such a performance? Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants.
Much of this is uncannily evocative of Trump’s appeal — though perhaps not all of it. For one thing, he does not call anyone to self-sacrifice: he tells his followers that (a) they are not to blame for anything bad that has happened to them and therefore need not change in any way, and (b) he will fix everything, all by himself. And I doubt whether he has the ability, over the long haul, to “hold the utmost loyalty” of lieutenants, except perhaps for some members of his family.

But in general, the portrait strikes me as uncomfortably accurate. And when I read it I think of a Twitter exchange from the other day:

“We are now fused with him.” Words worth pondering. But there is one last point that’s important to note:
Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.
This, it seems to me, Trump cannot do. It is rage and rage only that he kindles. Many of the people voting for him, by their own testimony, do not believe he will win and think that if he does win he is unlilely to be able to change anything. They just want to put the corrupt house of American politics to the torch, and then watch it burn.
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It would be amusing to watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: ‘I ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs…. But not being Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on …  let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles.’ What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one — that Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises….

Their letters may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They write to each other in a language of their own, an almost exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always used in speaking of Browning, ‘So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together. I hope they understand each other—nobody else would.’ It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a marriage.

— G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning
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Trump and women. This isn’t new. This is something old that has recrudesced, an atavism that has “become raw again.” This is a wound with the scab off. And now he just can’t hold it in, can he, he just can’t stop himself — out they come, these smoke signals of aggression. And he is being empirically stupid. The question you want to ask Trump is clearly not “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?”; it is “If you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?” Has something very grave happened to Trump’s I.Q.? He’s been worrying about it, too, it seems. Responding on the air to David Cameron’s opinion of his ban on Muslims (“stupid, divisive, and wrong”), Trump touchily (and ploddingly) shot back: “Number one, I’m not stupid, okay? I can tell you that right now. Just the opposite.” Don’t you blush for the lavishness of his insecurity? But Trump is insecurity incarnate — his cornily neon-lit vulgarity (reminding you of the pinups on Lolita’s bedroom wall: “Goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools”); his desperate garnering of praise (Crippled America quotes encomia from Travel and Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, BusinessWeek, and Golf Digest, among many other outlets); his penile pride.
Don the Realtor, by Martin Amis | Harper’s Magazine
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On August 2, 1100, the English king William Rufus was killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest, probably in an assassination, possibly by a genuine accident. We really don’t know. In modern times, though, that story developed an unexpected afterlife through the work of a bizarre scholar called Margaret A.  Murray (1863-1963). Murray was a distinguished Egyptologist, who developed a grand unified theory of European witchcraft. She argued that the records of witch-trials were not simply fictitious, but actually contained accounts of genuine underground pagan cults that flourished within a notionally Christian Europe.

This theory was not wholly new to her, and she had plenty of predecessors over the previous decades, including feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage. However, Murray brought the idea to a mass audience. That theory was expressed in Murray’s enormously influential 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and in The God of the Witches (1931). These books inspired countless horror novels, and Murray’s writings are even cited in H. P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu. They also largely inspired the actual creation of the Wicca movement, the supposedly revived witchcraft created by Gerald Gardner in the 1950s. Notionally, that too was a revival of an ancient pagan cult.

— Dark Majesty and Folk Horror. A fantastic post by my colleague Philip Jenkins, with a follow-up here. Philip should write a book about these matters, the bogus academic roots of neopaganism.

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this is how crazy things have become

An educated and presumably intelligent person who not only supports Donald Trump but who seems to believe that the United States, or at least the Republican Party, has become a hereditary monarchy, and that he himself, a radio host, is now conducting negotiations for transfer of power in pretty much exactly the same way that the Earl of Romney negotiated the abdication of James II and his replacement by William of Orange.